Film shows a 21-year-old Bernie Sanders, then a student, being arrested at protest for desegregation of Chicago public schools
Footage of a 1963 arrest of present-day Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. Bernie Sanders could help boost his campaign against frontrunner Hillary Clinton.
The video of the arrest was uploaded by the film company Kartemquin Films, which is producing a documentary on a 1963 protest for desegregation of Chicago’s public schools.
The footage shows a 21-year-old Bernard Sanders, a student at the University of Chicago at the time, being arrested on August 12 of that year. A photo of a news account from the protest says he was charged with resisting arrest.
The identity of the bespectacled young man in the video was confirmed by the Sanders campaign.
The New York Times reported: “On Friday, Michael Briggs, a spokesman for Mr. Sanders’s campaign, and Tad Devine, a senior adviser to the campaign, said Mr. Sanders had said it was him. What sealed it was the watch the man is wearing; Mr. Sanders recalled owning a watch like that, Mr. Devine said.”
The interest spurred the Chicago Tribune, which covered the protest at the time, to publish its own photo of Sanders from the arrest.
As the Tribune reported: “‘Bernie identified it himself,’ said Tad Devine, a senior adviser to the campaign, adding that Sanders looked at a digital image of the photo. ‘He looked at it — he actually has his student ID from the University of Chicago in his wallet — and he said, “Yes, that indeed is (me).”‘”
The release of the footage could be significant for the Sanders campaign as his civil-rights credentials — and thus his ties to minority and especially black voters who heavily favor Clinton — have been called into question by officials close to the Clinton campaign.
In Saturday’s Nevada caucus vote, which Clinton won by a slim margin according to entrance polls, a large majority of black caucus-goers supported Clinton, while whites and Hispanics were more evenly divided.
As reported by The Times of Israel